Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University Communication Theses Department of Communication Spring 5-2011 Imagining Queerness: Sexualities in Underground Films in the Contemporary P. R. China Jin Zhao Georgia State University Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Zhao, Jin, "Imagining Queerness: Sexualities in Underground Films in the Contemporary P. R. China." Thesis, Georgia State University, 2011. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/communication_theses/73 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Communication at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. IMAGINING QUEERNESS: SEXUALITIES IN UNDERGROUND FILMS IN THE CONTEMPORARY P. R. CHINA By JIN ZHAO Under the Direction of Leonard R. Teel ABSTRACT In response to the globalizing queerness argument and the cultural specificity argument in queer cultural studies, this thesis examines the emerging modern queer identity and culture in the contemporary People’s Republic of China (PRC) in an intercultural context. Recognizing Chinese queer culture as an unstable, transforming and complex collection of congruent and/or contesting meanings, not only originated in China but also traveling across cultures, this thesis aims to exorcise the reified images of Chinese queers, or tongzhi, to contribute to the understanding of a dynamic construction of Chinese queerness at the turn of a new century, and to lend insight on the complicity of the elements at play in this construction by analyzing the underground films with queer content made in the PRC. INDEX WORDS: Index: China, PRC, Queer, Tongzhi, Underground film, Globalization, Culture, Identity IMAGINING QUEERNESS: SEXUALITIES IN UNDERGROUND FILMS IN THE COMTEMPORARY P. R. CHINA by JIN ZHAO A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Masters of Arts in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2010 Copyright by Jin Zhao 2010 IMAGINING QUEERNESS: SEXUALITIES IN UNDERGROUND FILMS IN THE COMTEMPORARY P. R. CHINA by JIN ZHAO Electronic Version Committee Leonard R. Teel Approved: Chair: Committee: Jeff Bennett Hongmei Li Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University December 2010 iv DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to my parents, my brother, his wife and their beautiful baby boy Derek. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is a milestone that marked the end of a chapter in my life after a long journey that was full of challenges, surprises, and rewards. Upon the completion of this thesis, I want to express my gratitude to many who have helped and supported me throughout this journey. First of all, I would like to thank my committee. Dr. Leonard R. Teel, the chair of my committee, has been a wonderful mentor in my research, writing, and life. His comments helped me make this thesis stronger and myself a better researcher and writer. His priceless support of me has been throughout my graduate career, and his faith in me and my work has never changed. His encouragement has been a constant source of strength when I am faced with challenges and difficulties. I would also like to thank Dr. Jeff Bennett for his generous help in revising my drafts and offering me insights, comments, and suggestions that have made my work stronger. Especially, his in knowledge and insights in queer identity and movement studies was invaluable to this thesis. Thanks also go to Dr. Hongmei Li, who provided her knowledge and understanding in Chinese culture and intercultural communication, which helped me reflect on my work with fresh perspectives. Outside the academic circle, I would like to thank my mother, my father, my brother and his family for their unconditional love and support. I thank them for being my backbones wherever I go in whatever I aspire to achieve. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1 The Global Queerness and Cultural Specificity Critique 4 Research Questions 16 Film as Discourse and a Medium for Cultural Translation 16 Underground Queer Films in the Contemporary Mainland 20 China Text 22 2. UNDERGROUND GAY SOCIETY AND THE QUEST FOR SEXUAL 25 FREEDOM IN EAST PALACE, WEST PALACE Invisible Gay Public in China 29 Policing Sex 36 Shame and the Defiant Gay Voice 41 Between Sex and Politics 50 Conclusion 54 3. SEX, VIOLENCE, AND FAMINLY: LESBIAN IN FISH AND 56 ELEPHANT Chinese Lesbians and Fish and Elephant 57 The Invisible Lesbians 61 Sex, Violence, and Bodies 64 Family Matters 73 Conclusion 79 4. TONGZHI IDENTITY AND COMMUNITY IN TONGZHI 80 vii “Tongzhi” 82 The Communal Tongzhi Identity in Ji’nan 87 Separation and Integration 92 Relationships 95 Relationship with Family 99 Conclusion 107 5. CONCLUSION 109 WORKS CITED 119 1 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION In the 1990s, the inception of postcolonial studies as one of the responses to the multitude phenomena that the world had been experiencing in almost all aspects of human lives, what is understood by many as “globalization,” accompanied by the urgency of global HIV/AIDS prevention, compelled queer studies to take a global turn. As in many other discourses dealing with globalization, a tension between the globalizing impulse and the local response has existed in transnational queer studies. On one side is the narrative of a “global gay” who enjoys the transnational existence; on the other side is the critical counter-arguments that recognize the cultural specificities that “continue to matter for the practice and conceptualization of diverse sexualities, even in a world more than ever transnationally connected.”1 Informed by postcolonial studies, scholars who are critical of the global queer narrative not only repudiate the assumption persistent in mainstream public discourse that a global queerness constructed in Western historical and cultural contexts and predicated on the ideas of civil rights, individualism, sexual freedom, and democracy etc. is desirable and liberating across the world, but also question the very existence of this “global gay” by exposing the concept as a discursive construction instead of a given reality. In other words, the project of post-colonial queer studies aims to deconstruct the “global queerness” perpetuated by Western 1 Fran Martin, Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University, 2003), 28. 2 values and ideologies, to destabilize the central status of the West in global queer cultural flow, and to valorize alternative queer lives that exist outside the West. In order to decentralize queer studies, many postcolonial scholars seek to provide evidence of culturally specific sexualities found in non-Western cultural contexts that are different from the Western queerness. Since the 1990s, scholars have set out all over the world to collect the evidence of the existing and, in many cases, thriving queer cultures, which has amounted to an enormous body of literature. However, in seeking the indigenous, the genuine, and the different in non-Western cultures, these scholars risk the pitfall of Orientalizing, caricaturizing, tokenizing, and reifying local queerness, confusing denial as resistance. This pitfall leads to discourse that not only truncates, misrepresents, or misunderstands these non- Western cultures, but also involuntarily compromises and complies with the homophobic, patriarchal, and other oppressive forces in these cultures that are considered traditional and/or indigenous and thus more desirable than the Western queer lifestyle and politics. This tendency is seen in the studies of queer identity and culture in the People’s Republic of China that is often regarded as “opposite” to the West, a culture regarded by some to stress the relational aspect of sexual identities, family values, and non-articulate style of resistance. This tendency leads some scholars to turn away from recognizing the complex and evolving nature of the construct of Chinese queerness in a societal/cultural context in a post-socialist China shifting from the state-planned economy and socialism to the market economy and neo-liberalism in 3 the course of its modernization at the turn of the century. At the same time, as exemplified by Chou Wah-shan’s conceptualization of tongzhi identity and politics, these scholars turn towards an impulse to essentialize a sexual identity that decidedly “Chinese,” and to promote a politics that embraces queer subjects’ harmonious and private resistance while repudiating confrontational and public protests. Surely the cultural specificities are essential for any serious and responsible student in understanding Chinese queerness, but the overemphasis on the “Chineseness” of queer identities and politics may lead to a certain degree of denial of Western influence on how Chinese understand and construct sexual identities, as well as what lifestyles and political and societal environment Chinese queer subjects desire, and at same time may comply, though involuntarily, with the oppressive status quo based on traditional values. In other words, Chinese queerness must be understood in the complex and dynamic political and cultural context where complementary and/or contesting powers, such as the influence of Western modern/postmodern thoughts, China’s feudal and predominantly Confucian cultural traditions and its communist puritan cultural ideology, coexist and interplay. In the mid and late 1990s, underground films dealing with alternative sexualities started to emerge in mainland China,2 after decades of such subject’s absence in public discourse. At once reflecting and reconstructing reality, these films 2 “Mainland China” is used by Chinese from different Chinese societies to refer to People’s Republic of China before the returning of Hang Kong in 1997 and Macao in 1999. After these territories’ return back to China, this term is kept to refer to the same area of China that has been under the rule of the Communist Party of China since 1949.